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| Open-Source Search a Long Shot? |
| 摘自: www.redherring.com 被阅读次数: 291 |
由 yangyi 于 2007-07-31 19:09:28 提供 |
July 30, 2007 By Falguni Bhuta Jimmy Wales wants to do for search engines what his Wikipedia has done for the encyclopedia. But can he topple Google? Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is gunning for Google. But at least one analyst is warning it’s a mighty long shot. At an open-source conference in Portland, Oregon, on Friday, Mr. Wales announced that his San Mateo, California-based company, Wikia, had acquired web crawling technology from search site LookSmart. Wales and Co. will release the Grub technology under an open-source license and use it to power a community-developed search engine. “To some extent this is a political thing,” Mr. Wales said in a phone interview Monday. “Search is part of the fundamental structure of the Internet and should be transparent and open.” Mr. Wales, whose community-written and -edited encyclopedia site, Wikipedia, has become a household phenomenon, has set his sights on 2007 as a launch date for the search engine. It will reside on Wikia.com, an ad-supported site that lets people and groups create their own wikis. Wikia is currently in the design phase and is letting outside developers contribute to the various processes that go into the building of a search engine: devising algorithms, figuring out page rankings, defining indexes, and so on. Mr. Wales said he wants to make it possible for midsize companies to have Google-quality search on their sites without having to partner with the search behemoth to get it. And he wants to shine a little light on how search results get kicked up. “One way to see improvement in the quality of search engines is an open platform,” he said. “The way things are done right now is very secretive.” But search analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence has doubts about how successful the venture can be. For Wikia’s open-source search engine to work, he said, the quality of search results will have to stand out. “Is it going to be successful?” Mr. Sterling asked. “I don’t think the answer is ‘yes’ in the near term. It has to be better than ‘good enough’.” Previous open-source efforts, such as the Linux operating system, have worked and have managed to threaten proprietary technologies such as Microsoft’s Windows. But the situation with Google and an upstart like Wikia is not quite the same, Mr. Sterling said. With Linux, it’s been more about ending Microsoft’s near-total reign over computer operating systems. In the case of search engines, though there’s one clear leader in Google, there are several other players, including Yahoo, AOL, and Ask.com. The motivation for users to switch to an open-source competitor may not be as high this time around, Mr. Sterling said. But for Mr. Wales, it’s not simply about beating the competition. “I just want to do something cool,” he said. |
